Thursday, January 03, 2013

Shiit…next thing you know Pitchfork will be clipping my Idiotic Top 75 Indi/Undi Song List.

The results of 2013 Baseball Hall of Fame voting will be announced on Wednesday, and this year represents a unique ballot. Steroid users, suspected steroid users, a cocaine user, a catcher, Jack Morris. Want a preview? Baseball Think Factory has compiled the votes from every writer that made their vote public (including two who aren’t voting at all), and the results are only shocking if you somehow didn’t read our headline.

The 2013 Hall Of Fame Ballot Collecting Gizmo is being updated daily, and as of now has 84 full ballots—nearly 15 percent of the total. That’s a much larger sample size than election day exit polls, though it is self-selected.

...Nobody gets a plaque! (Except for three Veterans Committee selections, all of whom have been dead for at least 74 years.) We predicted this result, but it’d still be a shock to see Craig Biggio left out. He’s a sportswriter’s wet dream, atop a ballot without any sure things. But I suppose proximity to PED suspicion is damning enough these days.

If you’re curious about accuracy, exit polls proved remarkably prescient last year. Both BBTF’s (scroll down to comment #10 to see their 2012 predictor) and a second ballot tracker had Barry Larkin as the only man in, both nailing his percentage in the high 80s. There are still plenty of uncounted ballots, but Craig Biggio is going to need a surge or Cooperstown will be kind of lonely this summer.

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I hope this doesn't become like when people got the impression that Bill James was predicting Jeff Bagwell (hey, weird) would win the batting title as a rookie. "BTF" is not "predicting no one makes it".

I hope this doesn't become like when people got the impression that Bill James was predicting Jeff Bagwell (hey, weird) would win the batting title as a rookie. "BTF" is not "predicting no one makes it".

Quite correct. In fact, don't our current numbers actually suggest that Biggio will make it? Don't the raw percentages from our tabulation usually get a 5-7% boost when the "silent majority" comes in?

If by "surge" you mean 76% of the outstanding vote vs 71% of the counted vote, then yes.

Biggio is on track to finish about where Alomar finished on his first ballot (73%), just behind Dawson (78) and Morris (74). With three candidates around the 50s (Morris, Larkin, Smith), the 2013 election looks a good bit like the 2010 election.

One thing about the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame is that the inaugural class was really big. Imagine if the baseball HOF opened with, not just Cobb/Ruth/Wagner/Mathewson/Johnson, but everyone down to the Fred Clarke level. So that has taken some luster away from the yearly elections afterwards, and led to some questionable folks getting inducted just for the sake of inducting people, IMO. But I'm sure it's the best wrestling HOF we've got. (Especially compared to the WWE Hall of Fame, natch.)

If by "surge" you mean 76% of the outstanding vote vs 71% of the counted vote, then yes.

Yes, that's what they mean by surge. I find your confusion confusing. Given 15% of the vote, it's pretty unlikely that the rest of the ballots would be weighted 5% more strongly in Biggio's favor. Not impossible, by any means, but not likely. Hence, there would need to be a surge in support.

One thing about the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame is that the inaugural class was really big. Imagine if the baseball HOF opened with, not just Cobb/Ruth/Wagner/Mathewson/Johnson, but everyone down to the Fred Clarke level. So that has taken some luster away from the yearly elections afterwards, and led to some questionable folks getting inducted just for the sake of inducting people, IMO. But I'm sure it's the best wrestling HOF we've got. (Especially compared to the WWE Hall of Fame, natch.)

No doubt, that original list went way too deep and they've since reeled it in. Going forward it becomes way more exclusive (Sting still not in being the biggest discussion every year). But yeah, it doesn't feature Pete Rose or Vince's limo driver, so there's that.

Biggio is on track to finish about where Alomar finished on his first ballot (73%), just behind Dawson (78) and Morris (74). With three candidates around the 50s (Morris, Larkin, Smith), the 2013 election looks a good bit like the 2010 election.

I'm sure you meant to say Blyleven was the one that finished five votes short. :p

it's pretty unlikely that the rest of the ballots would be weighted 5% more strongly in Biggio's favor. Not impossible, by any means, but not likely. Hence, there would need to be a surge in support.

The standard deviation on a sample of 85 votes is big enough to make a systematic surge unnecessary, random variation can do the job. Even though systematic effects isn't all that unlikely in themselves (the sample is self-selected, we know that voters without writing gigs are a different population with different values).

Given 15% of the vote, it's pretty unlikely that the rest of the ballots would be weighted 5% more strongly in Biggio's favor. Not impossible, by any means, but not likely. Hence, there would need to be a surge in support.

Not likely but hardly impossible -- it's about 10-15% ASSUMING a random sample.

In real terms though, it's really quite small. 71% of the published electorate (as of 85 votes) think he's an HoFer. He's currently 4 votes shy of 75%. Based on last year, out of the remaining voters he need 370 votes rather than 366 (75%) to make up the difference.

We don't know a lot about the unpublished other than they like Mattingly a lot more than the published. We tend to assume this is an older group and it must contain (nearly) all of the voters who don't cover baseball anymore. One would guess (and it's a guess) that population might be more impressed by 3000 hits and they might be less aware of Biggio "rumors" although we would also guess they are even more staunchly anti-roids (McGwire tends to drop a bit although I think Palmeiro went up a bit one year). I would guess Biggio will go up but probably not quite enough to make it.

I have no confusion, I'm questioning whether the author (and maybe some people here) realize that the necessary "surge" here is 4 votes out of nearly 500 outstanding votes? One could just as easily say is that all Biggio needs to do is barely surpass the 75% mark with the rest of the electorate and he's in. Or to put it another way, if Biggio was sitting on 75% right now we'd say "well, he needs at least 75% of the outstanding votes to make it." Instead he's sitting on 71% and we have to say "he needs at least 75% + 4 of the outstanding votes to make it." Those are not substantially different statements in my book, especially when we're pretty confident we have a biased sample. Whether it meets any individual's definition of a "surge" is not a question I can answer although that is an argument for writers avoiding imprecise terms like "surge."

Austin (at least) is an all-timer--he was WWF's biggest star during one of its most successful periods. Cena's been the face of the company for 5 years or so although I can barely remember a single moment of his.

Ric Flair was the best I ever saw, week-in and week-outin his NWA days he never gave a subpar effort. Watching him go 45 minutes against Barry Windham (twice) at house shows completely transformed my appreciation for the art of pro-rasslin.

Yeah, Michaels would be the one to remove from that proposed inaugural class -- he was of course a great performer, but to be "inaugural class" good, you should also be one of the top draws in the history of the industry, which he isn't at all.

I guess you could argue for removing Hogan on the converse logic, i.e., he was no good in the ring, but I would ultimately say drawing money is more important than in-ring work.

(Even given the humongous inaugural class I described, it took Michaels quite a long time to be elected to the Wrestling Observer HOF. I suspect that his second run, where he wasn't a backstage troublemaker and still performed at a terrific level, actually adds more to his case than the first run where he held the titles.)

I guess you could argue for removing Hogan on the converse logic, i.e., he was no good in the ring, but I would ultimately say drawing money is more important than in-ring work.

Yeah, when it comes to pro-rasslin there's really no way around that fact. A good worker can draw big money with proper booking, but some guys can draw despite terribly illogical booking and awful opponents and that's what the industry has to value. Too bad, any wrestling HOF that omits Les Thornton and Billy Robinson is the poorer for it.

As a complete aside, I haven't watched 'rasslin at all in about 10 years, but I happened to stumble on a show last night and who was in the ring but The Hulkster himself, working some angle with his gigantic daughter Brooke. She's dating one of the Dudley Brothers, from what I could discern before fleeing the whole morass.